Democrats show some fight, finally

Gov. Deval Patrick’s call for Democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what they believe received loud and resounding cheers at last week’s Democratic Convention, as well it should.

For much of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Democrats have allowed themselves to be bullied and silenced by right-wing extremists in the Republican Party.

When President Obama signed his signature legislation — the Affordable Care Act — into law and the right-wing extremists responded with their full-throated and venomous counterattack, Democrats retreated rather than fight.

And in the absence of any meaningful Democrats’ defense of the historic health care reform legislation, the extremists pilloried the law, creating such negative public perception of it that leading up to the 2010 midterm elections many Democrats running for re-election said very little, if anything, about the law they had helped to pass.

Of course, muteness didn’t really help their cause.

Democrats ended up taking a shellacking at the polls, losing 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

There were other instances of Democrats backing down instead of defending some of their core beliefs.

Last year, for example, in the fight over the country’s debt limit, President Obama caved to the bullies on the right when he agreed to about $1.2 trillion in spending cuts without any balancing proposals for revenue increases.

That fight, lowering the country’s $16 trillion debt, still goes on, with Republicans still adamant in meeting that goal through massive spending cuts and tax relief, and Democrats opting for a more balanced approach — spending cuts mixed with some revenue increases.

The Republicans’ approach, as Congressman James McGovern once said, places the burden of debt reduction “on the backs of those who can least afford it, while it spares the wealthy from contributing anything.”

So it was reassuring to see Democrats at their convention ready to fight for their convictions, instead of running and hiding.

And it wasn’t surprising that Mr. Patrick was a central figure of that transformation. Who better to talk about the Affordable Care Act, for example?

In an earlier interview with NPR this year, he had forcibly made the case for Obamacare by noting that it was modeled on Massachusetts’ successful health care law.

Among other things, Mr. Patrick noted that in Massachusetts 99.8 percent of children and 98 percent of our overall population now have health coverage; that the state is healthier by any number of measures; that the cost of health care has come down on a per capita basis; that more businesses are offering health insurance to their employees today than before health care reform went into effect; that Massachusetts residents have all the choices they used to have and more; and that the state is bringing down health care costs.

Mr. Patrick was not alone in trumpeting a stiffening Democratic backbone.

Speaker after speaker at the convention spoke about standing up for a balanced approach to curb the country’s debt; standing up for the middle class; standing up for labor; standing up for the children of illegal immigrants who have lived in this country all their lives but are subjected to deportation to countries in which they have never lived; and standing up for a woman’s right to choose and for a person to marry whomever the person loves.

Fighting on principles might cost Democrats votes at the polls in November, but theirs is a worthy and defiant stance given the backward, greed-dominated alternate universe the other side is selling.